DELL XPS L702X on Mountain Lion?

Has anyone gotten this to work properly? Or more precisely, has anyone gotten Audio to work?

have you some news about lion on XPS L702X ? I have a L702X and I want to know if sound, wifi and gpu nvidia gt 550M work with lion ?

maxter59 said:

have you some news about lion on XPS L702X ? I have a L702X and I want to know if sound, wifi and gpu nvidia gt 550M work with lion ?

Click to expand...

Hello, I have the same laptop and I can confirm that both, Lion and Mountain Lion, work on this model. You need some kexts for audio and others, but if you have the intel wifi card, it won't work, neither the nvdia card.

You can buy an usb wifi adapter or change the stock card, like I did, and if you don't need it for gaming, I think you'll have enough with the Intel HD3000 graphics card included within the processor.

Greetings.

I have been running Lion and now ML for over a year on my XPS L702x - this is a Sandy Bridge machine with the GT550M 1080p 3D screen. The 3D screen is critical for nVidia function as the Optimus feature is turned off and the Intel HD3000 video is not reachable. No SD card and USB 3.0 is not reliable; uses the Bluetooth from original Intel card, added WiFi via an Apple Extreme Atheros PCI-e, sound and microphone, battery, SSD Trim support, accelerated video support via Lion/ML compatible kexts, some edited, some not. I am running 3 HD's; 2 SSDs, 256GB for Mac OS X and Windows 7 dual-boot and a 512 GB for Data and a 750GB 7200 RPM Standard HD (in the DVD tray) for on the fly back-up of all the partitions. You cannot boot from the DVD tray drive. I have two memory slots with 8GB each.

I have ordered a Dell 17R SE 7720 w/3D screen and will install ML on in it in a week or so. There is an old thread about my LION install experiences which contains a lot of good background info but the newer installs appear to be much more friendly. Depending on how much time I have I may write it up.

StarbucksSteve said:

I have been running Lion and now ML for over a year on my XPS L702x - this is a Sandy Bridge machine with the GT550M 1080p 3D screen. The 3D screen is critical for nVidia function as the Optimus feature is turned off and the Intel HD3000 video is not reachable. No SD card and USB 3.0 is not reliable; uses the Bluetooth from original Intel card, added WiFi via an Apple Extreme Atheros PCI-e, sound and microphone, battery, SSD Trim support, accelerated video support via Lion/ML compatible kexts, some edited, some not. I am running 3 HD's; 2 SSDs, 256GB for Mac OS X and Windows 7 dual-boot and a 512 GB for Data and a 750GB 7200 RPM Standard HD (in the DVD tray) for on the fly back-up of all the partitions. You cannot boot from the DVD tray drive. I have two memory slots with 8GB each.

I have ordered a Dell 17R SE 7720 w/3D screen and will install ML on in it in a week or so. There is an old thread about my LION install experiences which contains a lot of good background info but the newer installs appear to be much more friendly. Depending on how much time I have I may write it up.

Click to expand...

Could you give me some info on how to install this on my Dell. I also have the same L702x with the A19 BIOS. I tried the insanelyMac forum with the instructions but wasn't sure about some steps. Could you help me or walk me through how to install ML on my Dell? So far I've been able to install ML and use Multibeast but still I cannot boot from the HD and I don't have any audio. I have ML installed on a partition on my second HD. Could you please advise?

Sure. Would you put some specifics in so I know what/how much hard drive space we have, etc. Specifically, it would be good to know your long term goal - mine is to run Mac OS X almost exclusively so I minimize my Windows build.

I would suggest the following although it does not have to be this way. Please note that I do not guarantee you won't destroy your Windows partition although nothing we intend to do should have that result. These steps assume a smaller MBR drive as the first drive and a larger GPT drive as the second.; you may want to alter locations to be able to maximize your Data drive size.

1) insure your Windows drive is healthy. Make a physical copy of the drive using something like Acronis, if possible, just in case.

2) Shrink your Windows partition and make an EMPTY, non-formatted space for a ML install on your Windows drive - this will allow us to install Chameleon and dual boot from there. For example, let's say you have 500GB - make an empty 100GB (this is plenty of space, keep reading) partition by shrinking windows and deleting the recovery drive AFTER making a 'Recovery' folder on your windows C: drive and copying the contents of the whole recovery Drive into it - I find the Dell recovery partitions to simply be worthless but to each his own.

3) Boot into your existing ML install, format the new ML partition as HPFS+ with a name similar to, but ever so slightly different from your current install; for example, I use MtnLion as my primary boot (which will be this one which we are currently formatting) and MtnLionX (which would be your current install) as my second drive.

4) Download CarbonCopyCloner and copy your current install into your new empty partition. CCC will copy from your active boot and will NOT rename the destination.

5) Reboot into the new partition to insure it works and that we now have two, identical, working installs. Shrink your second install to a size approx. equal to the new one so the second drive has empty space; build a second partition in the empty space for your MAC data files, HPFS+, call it something similar to your current user folder but not quite the same. In my setup, I do NOT access the data drive from Windows.

STOP! and let me know if 1) this is OK and 2) that you have completed this much.

Here's a picture of my current L702x with this setup. Drives sizes are System Reserved 105MB, Windows (called Local) 138GB, MtnLion 117GB, DadsData 538GB and MtnLionX 101GB. Note: I am moving to a N7720 - no accelerated video yet - which is why you see a DVD drive and only two disks.

Steve,

Thanks for the info. I haven't gotten around to doing this yet but could you tell me how to enable audio. I downloaded the 10.8.2 XPS 17 folder from the insanlymac forum that has the DSDT and STSD for the A19 BIOS but still couldn't get my audio to work. I deleted the AppleHDA kexts and cache from the partition using MacDrive and repaired the permissions using the app in the folder. then i used KextBeast to install the AppleHDA file that was in the download and fixed the caches again but when i restart it, it still doesn't have audio. The output device and input device in prefererencs is blank but when I look at the system report, it shows infomation in the field for audio. Could you assist. Thanks again for the help. Love OS X!

The issue you have is related to the boot process - no audio until we are booting from a post-install boot setup. We can either finish your install which will result in audio OR you can obtain another USB boot stick, rebuild the installation using your final DSDT, final kexts and /Extra which will allow your audio to work.

Of course, there is another potential issue and we should probably address that now. We need to insure your audio is the same; just because you have an L702x does not mean your audio is the same. So we should gather some info from your Windows install just to not waste a lot of time. Run AiDA64 reports, all hardware, txt output and put it on your install stick so we can xfer it to the Mac side. AIDA64 will also extract your DSDT and SSDT's although SSDT's are not necessary for our installation.

StarbucksSteve said:

The issue you have is related to the boot process - no audio until we are booting from a post-install boot setup. We can either finish your install which will result in audio OR you can obtain another USB boot stick, rebuild the installation using your final DSDT, final kexts and /Extra which will allow your audio to work.

Of course, there is another potential issue and we should probably address that now. We need to insure your audio is the same; just because you have an L702x does not mean your audio is the same. So we should gather some info from your Windows install just to not waste a lot of time. Run AiDA64 reports, all hardware, txt output and put it on your install stick so we can xfer it to the Mac side. AIDA64 will also extract your DSDT and SSDT's although SSDT's are not necessary for our installation.

Click to expand...

So i copied my current everything to the new parition but when i try to boot the screen says boot0: error. And i cant get anywhere else from there